Translated written materials are under-provided and constrained to common languages and simple documents

Narrative synthesis #

Translated written materials reach fewer patients than the documents that mark legal milestones: in a survey of children's hospitals, all translate patient-rights handouts and 97% translate consent forms, but only 74% translate discharge instructions (Davis), and in a surgical cohort just 31% of LEP patients received any language-concordant paperwork (Rosenthal). Where translation does happen, three structural constraints bound its reach: standardized pretranslated libraries and EHR templates — the dominant strategy — cover only common languages (mainly Spanish) and cannot be personalized; hospitals lean on interpreters (trained for verbal work) to translate, restricting that to short or simple documents; and machine translation is near-uniformly prohibited as standalone, removing a scalable shortcut (all from Davis). Together these document both the size of the coverage gap and the mechanisms that hold it in place. These are descriptive survey, policy-content, and chart-review measures, not evaluated patient outcomes.

"Although these approaches may improve access to standardized instructions for a few languages, they do not allow for personalization and may not benefit individuals who speak less-common non-English languages. Notably, LEP individuals in the US speak over 200 different languages." (Davis, 2019, p. 7)